Digital, or virtual, personal assistants such as Apple's Siri, Google's Assistant, Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana, and others provide solutions for performing tasks or services associated with an individual. Such digital personal assistants can be used to request and perform various data exchanges, including transactions, social media interactions, search engine queries, and others. Additionally, similar functionality can be incorporated into web browsers and dedicated applications. Digital assistants may be one type of conversational interface, where users can input a request or statement into the conversational interface and receive semantic output responsive to the original input. Conversational interfaces may be included in social networks, mobile applications, instant messaging platforms, websites, and other locations or applications. Conversational interfaces may be referred to as or may be represented as chat bots, instant messaging (IM) bots, interactive agents, or any other suitable name or representation.
Conversational interfaces are commonly integrated into dialog systems of these digital assistants or into specific applications or platforms, and can be used to engage in interactions from casual conversations to expert system analysis. Conversational interfaces may accept inputs and/or output responses in various formats, including textual inputs and/or outputs, auditory inputs and/or outputs, video-captured inputs (e.g., via facial movement input), or video or other animated output.